Documentary Talents
There is no photo attached to this post, you have to look up to the right, where you get three of them. Co-editor of filmkommentaren.dk, Allan Berg, suggested that I chose three obvious talents, who have made films which travel and are awarded, and who will – hopefully – give us more great works in decades to come. Here they are:
To the left Sara Ishaq, two films of hers have been on filmkommentaren.dk, both dealing with Yemen: ”Kamara has No Walls”, nominated for an Oscar 2013 and ”The Mulberry House” from 2013, a quote from the review of the latter: A family film? Yes. Private? No. Personal? Yes, as it is a film about a daughter, who returns to her roots… oops, now the words start to be klichés. Roots, yes but conveyed in a way so we non-yemenites easily can identify with the family, the three generations and its situation, in a film that captures the warmth and passes it on to us in a light tone that is broken when reality knocks on the door.
In the middle Salome Jashi, who after the short films ”Their Helicopter” and ”Speechless” made the middle length ”The Leader is always Right” an ” observational documentary from one of the patriotic youth camps in Georgia” before turning to what is her international breakthrough, ”Bahkmaro”, that gave her the main award in Jihlava 2011. The jury motivation was precise: “With an attentive and personal approach the filmmaker transforms an ordinary microcosm into a unique narrative and playful visual experience. Through an effective and assured cinematic language this film reveals the mood and the spirit of a society struggling with its internal hopes and contradictions. For its respect, artistry and quest for surprise the award for the Best film of “The Between the Seas” Competition goes to Bakhmaro by Salome Jashi.”
To the right Davis Simanis, Latvian documentary director and editor, whose film about the new national library in Riga won the Baltic award at the festival in Vilnius in 2013: ” ”Chronicles of the Last Temple”, a superb interpretation of the new and much discussed National Library of Riga, a film that shows Simanis ability to capture the grandeur of a building and its details in a super aesthetic form. His newest work ”Escaping Riga” presents in an original cinematic form two world-class 20th century geniuses, the British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin and the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein.
